Steve Shaviro: Science fiction is one of the best tools we have for making sense of hyperbolic situations like these. Both in its large-scale world-building and in its small-scale attention to the particular ways in which social and technical innovations affect our lives, science fiction comes to grips with abstractions like economies, social formations, technological infrastructures, and climate perturbations. These are what the ecocritic Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects: entities that are perfectly real in and of themselves, but that are so out of scale with regard to our immediate experience that we find them almost impossible to grasp. The effects of hyperobjects are so massive, and so widely distributed across time and space, that we cannot apprehend them directly. We never experience any particular moment as the one in which climate change, or technological change, actually happens. Either these changes are incipient, just on the verge of happening, or else they have happened already, before we were able to notice. Global capitalism, like global warming, is altogether actual, and yet oddly impalpable: its traces are everywhere, and yet it is never before us as a whole at any given moment or in any given place. A hyperobject lies so far beyond the limits of our senses that it cannot be understood intuitively, but only abstractly. We may model such an object mathematically and computationally; or else we may encapsulate it in the form of a story. One of the great virtues of science fiction in particular is that it works as a kind of focusing device, allowing us to feel the effects of these hyperobjects — of digital technology, or capitalism, or climate change—intimately and viscerally, on a human and personal scale, contained within the boundaries of a finite narrative. Science fiction is, among other things, a form of psycho-socio-technological cartography. It engages in the process of what theorists have called “cognitive mapping” (Fredric Jameson) and “affective mapping” ( Jonathan Flatley). It traces our place alongside, and within, these hyperobjects that threaten to overwhelm us. Via the man himself.

* Lindsey Graham, pathetic liar. More here from Ezra Klein, who denounces for the millionth time the inevitable failure of legislative outreach to Republicans, and Steve Benen, who denounces for the millionth-and-first time the inevitable failure of legislative outreach to Republicans.

In a text from 1988, Fredric Jameson argues for the necessary emergence of what he calls ‘an aesthetics of cognitive mapping’: an aesthetic adequate to the highly ambitious – and he suggests ultimately impossible – task of depicting both social space in our historical moment – then described as late capitalism or postmodernity – and the totality of class relations on a global scale: what Jameson calls ‘a cartography of the absolute’. This notion of cognitive mapping builds on Kevin Lynch’s book from 1960, The Image of the City, and Jameson argues that an inability to cognitively map the contours of the world system is as debilitating politically as being unable to mentally map a city would be for a city dweller. The works that would emerge under the banner of this aesthetic would allow individual subjects and collectivities to understand their local situation in a globalised world: ‘to enable a situational representation on part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’(6). While the works emerging under the aesthetic of cognitive mapping would not merely be didactic or pedagogical, they would necessarily also be didactic or pedagogical. While Jameson’s text remained speculative, as he claimed that no such works had yet been produced and that he could not even imagine what their formal characteristics might be, The Wire can be understood as one the most cogent attempts at producing a work classifiable under such an aesthetic.